We’ve all grown accustomed to Twitter’s website going down. And even Facebook is often less than reliable. But tonight a big boy has crashed. Apple.com is completely offline right now.
No, I’m not talking about the Apple Store being taken down for its routine maintenance. I’m talking about the entire site being down, returning a “Http/1.1 Service Unavailable” error for about 15 minutes now.
While sites like Apple sometimes experience slowness, they rarely completely fail. Apple uses Akamai to serve the actual website and its content, and it was down everywhere, based on some tests we ran quickly. That’s fairly crazy, and likely points to a an original source server error not on Akamai’s end. But still, you’d think Akamai would have have a cache to serve rather than an error.
Let’s break out those conspiracy theories. I blame Twitter.
Update: And she’s back. Seemingly, unharmed.
[thanks Austin]
wwsjd?
you mean this guy?
http://www.tech...the-mothership/
DDOS attack from Windows fanboys?
LMAO, yeah I know that’s not the case.
But what if it was? That would be fun.
Whoa, I totally missed this. I wonder, but at the same time doubt, if this effected itunes at all?
c’mon… writing a blog post for this? really?
Stop crying.
Just read, enjoy & move on eddie
Twitter + Apple = MG Siegler
Cool, how much funding can I get?
As much as you want, don’t worry about making money, either. Who should I make the check out to?
very interesting
Not to be snide, but is this really worthy of a TC post? It’s becoming impossible to read all the posts published on TC in a single day. Today alone (October 13) there are already 38 posts on TC. Yes, 38.
Beyond a certain number, nobody can read them all. I used to read every TC article. Then I started skimming and selecting. Now, I just select 1 or 2 a day to read.
On a policy level, TC needs to reduce the number of daily posts to a manageable number. On a specific level, not publishing fairly tricial posts like this one would help stem the deluge.
I totally agree.
really? b/c most of the posts on TC are pretty short – a few paragraphs at most. For example, this one. Even if you read all 38 it would probably add up to a couple/three full articles on nytimes, wsj, etc.
isn’t there a formula that says more posts = more $$?
Don’t really need a formula, do you? more articles = more clicks = more ad views = MONEY FOR FUHRER ARRINGTON.
Agree .. it if it really want s to post .. then please it be apart from twitter, facebook, apple …
there are other websites as well which goes down ..
and I dont think there was any need to write a whole article ..
Best,
Daina Thomas
HOLY CRAP, APPLE BOUGHT TWITTER!
that is awesome. and, of course, how does twitter pay the favor back? crashes the apple website
You know, when you have like 20 Twitter-related posts on the TC index people are like “Oh, there is TechCrunch, blowing Twitter again.” We’re used to it- hell we pretty much expect it now.
But now you’re turning posts about other, completely unrelated websites in to Twitter posts? Really?
Come on TC.
TechCrunch was also down this afternoon for several minutes.
Karma.
maybe…. New Toys will be arriving this week….
At least now when people come to the IT dept we can say “Hey, Apple.com goes down sometimes too you know.”
What Bill said.
Wish they’d stay down.
http://www.apple.com is an alias for http://www.appl....com.akadns.net.
http://www.appl....com.akadns.net has address 17.112.152.32
That is an apple IP address. The main apple site is served by apple, not Akamai. Akamai merely serves as a DNS load balancer. Akamai does serve some of apples products in cache, like iTunes but not the http://www.apple.com site.
http://www.bing.com is an alias for search.ms.com.edgesuite.net.
search.ms.com.edgesuite.net is an alias for a134.g.akamai.net.
Bing on the other hand is cached. Edgesuite is the caching product, akadns is the DNS management product. Apple was down, not Akamai. There was no cache in place, so no cache to serve.
Does techcrunch have a forums center?
Wow…I’ve never complained about the excessive amount of twitter posts, but something must be said about the fact that an unrelated topic is turned into a twitter related topic. This is on top of the fact that you wrote an entire article just because a website went down for a couple of minutes.
That’s not being fair. In TC’s defense, I haven’t seen them write an entire article yet.
A friend inside Apple told me it was nothing major, it was fixed in minutes, and it was reported to whoever runs the site before it even hit Twitter.
Techcrunch needs a gong for their blog posts.
After 10 users ‘gong it’ the post goes to other gonged articles for those who have insomnia.
I would gong this one right away.
Ha. I like the headline AND I’m not even a morning person…